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Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago is a horrible metric to judge politicians. Policies take a while to implement so a really bad first year that you've inherited could overwhelm the next 33.5 months. The economic cycle can overpower policies anyway. And there are other issues besides personal well-being which seems to over-focus on economic issues. 4 years is both too arbitrary a time frame and too short of a time frame.

How exactly are you judging countries? If you are judging by border control/customs, then I can believe that the US is the second worst. US customs is the biggest hassle even for US citizens, and they try to be nice and efficient for US citizens. But that hardly is a decent judge of a country as a whole.

Unless the Europeans are a hell of a lot better at determining these numbers then we are, they are sure to be revised. More than once. There is no guarantee that 5 years from now 2nd quarter 2013 EU GDP will still be positive. For instance US fourth quarter 2012 GDP was initially -0.1%, revised to +0.1%, revised to +0.4%.

There is a difference between a tax credit and a tax deduction. A legitimate business expense is a tax deduction and will save you whatever you spend times your margnial tax rate. A tax credit on the other hand will save you 100% of your cost on your taxes.

Try again. Sequestration hit 5 months into the year. Assuming a relatively constant spending of money, $894 million is 8.6% of $10.4 billion[which is 7/12 of 17.8 billion]. This makes senses as it is the commonly quoted percentage for every agency facing cuts. But all of that budget isn't really cuttable. Say half of the budget is uncuttable. That leaves you needing to suddenly cut 20% out of the budget that is cuttable. This is where you get 1 day a week furloughs and whole programs/services eliminated like we've been hearing about in other agencies.

They haven't finished counting the vote. Mostly on the West Coast. CA/WA/OR/CO/ID/MT and the northeast[CT/NH/ME principally]. These are almost all states Obama won except ID/MT. Obama's final margin is likely to be over 3% when all is said and done. So the polls shouldn't be analyzed/graded too precisely yet.

It's not that simple. How do you get states not participating in the compact to cooperate with a recount? How do you get a state not in the compact to count all provisional ballots when their result isn't particularly close? How do you have a national popular vote when voting eligibility rules vary by state? Is it fair to compare raw votes in a state with early voting and same day registration and a state that votes on one day with narrow absentee rules and you have to register a month ahead of time? If you think none of that will make too much of a difference, remember that the whole point for the change is for close elections. Any margin greater than 1-2% in the popular vote will invariably result in the 'correct' electoral college outcome.

For perspective of how low a bar $50,000 is, open secrets has the FEC data for the race. Both of the top 2 candidates have raised over $1.4 million dollars as of 2 months ago, and have likely raised a bunch more since. Even excluding PAC/other money they have raised $866k/$1.22m.

But the BBC is broadcast in the US! From my local npr station: midnight-5am 7 days a week "BBC world service", m-f 5am-6am "BBC World Update", m-f 9am-10am, m-f 8pm-9pm "The World"[a collaboration of the BBC and PRI]. That's 1/3 of the programming time monday through friday including 2 prime hours. It's on pbs on tv 7:30pm-8pm. And of course its on BBC America. So you can hardly say the BBC is better than news broadcast in the US when the BBC itself broadcasts in the US.